Black Cab Have Created The Soundtrack For A Japanese Sci-Fi Film That Doesn’t Exist Yet

On Melbourne-based dark/indie electronica outfit Black Cab's new fifth full-length album Akira (which is also denoted with the symbol 明), co-founding member Andrew Coates enthuses, "It's going to look beautiful, we've spent a lot of time on the artwork. We're getting a thing called an obi strip, which is what those Japanese imports have; the little strip that comes on the vinyl. We've purposely done one of those, with the Japanese writing on it. We want people to think this release is some obscure soundtrack from Kyoto or somewhere."

The sound of the record is also strongly influenced by the land of the rising sun. "It's a different type of album, it's like a soundtrack of Japanese sci-fi film," he says, "and we've never done a soundtrack before. This was an opportunity to do one, so now we have a soundtrack. Of course, the movie hasn't actually been made! But we won't let that get in the way of putting out a soundtrack," he laughs.

When asked whether his band actually intends to make a film around this 'soundtrack', Coates offers, "The budget that we have is probably not going to stretch that far [laughs]. If someone wants to produce a Japanese-speaking anime movie around our music, we'd be thrilled!"

Originally much of this music was written to be performed purely for a special one-off show, but it has now taken on a life of its own. "This came out because we were asked to do a live soundtrack to the classic anime movie Akira," he explains. "We performed it in January at the Astor Theatre in front of about 1,200 people. It was a pretty big deal. We had a live Japanese Taiko drummer playing along, so we thought we might perform it again.

"But then the publishing company for the original film — we learned that they were not particularly thrilled with us messing with their soundtrack, so that was knocked on the head. We thought, 'We've done all this music, it'd be great to get it out there'."

In fact, the sounds and spirit of Japan are all over this record. "There's the sounds of crows from Tokyo streets, there's spooky spoken Japanese nursery rhymes across the album, there's Japanese people practising baseball in a Tokyo park — so there's all this wacky stuff."

The band have a brief run of live dates up the east coast in August to promote the album and plenty else on their plates besides. And fans can expect more new music from Black Cab over the next six to 12 months or so. "There's a remix of a track called Empire States that's just been completed by a guy called Richard Norris, that'll come out in September," he says. "There's also a new Cab album coming. It's probably half finished. That'll probably come out early next year."